单选题The writer develops his ideas in the three-paragraph passage by means of

单选题There is no question that some "greenwashing" is going on in the corporate world. Bayernwerk, a Bavarian utility, began selling "Aqua Power" last year when Germany began to let customers choose their electricity supplier. Bayernwerk markets Aqua Power as 100% green, renewable, hydroelectric energy. But any customer who signs up gets power from the same mix of sources as before: hydro, gas, coal and nuclear. Nothing changes except some accounting, and there is no net benefit to the environment. There is a benefit, though, to Bayernwerk, which charges more for Aqua Power and has been swamped with orders for it. Greenwashing takes many forms. "Companies often advertise themselves as environmentally friendly even though they might have some pretty hideous environmental records," says Jill Johnson of the group Earth Day 2000. California's PG&E, the utility that settled out of court after the real Erin Brockovich accused it of polluting groundwater, runs pro-environmental ads. But PG&E is due in court in November on charges of polluting wells in a second California town. "PG&E has a very good environmental track record," says spokesman Greg Pruett, citing recycling and waste reduction. Weyerhaeuser, the timber company, cuts old-growth trees in Canada but trumpets the 100 million tree seedlings it will plant this year. Overall, the greening of corporate America is real and has not been as hard to achieve as some environmental activists imagined. That is especially true for greenhouse gases and climate change, the focus of Earth Day 2000. "Now there is more recognition by companies that there may be an economic advantage to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases," says Paul Portney, president of the think tank Resources for the Future. More and more companies are changing the way they heat and light their buildings and design their factories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as their energy bills. (Energy-efficiency upgrades can save a company roughly $1 per square foot of office or factory space every year. ) The reductions often exceed those called for in the 1997 international agreement on greenhouse warming called Kyoto Treaty, whose goal of reducing greenhouse emissions 7% from their 2000 levels is deemed so threatening to the economy by many oil, coal and chemicals companies that the White House does not dare to submit it to the Senate for ratification.

单选题That low moaning sound in the background just might be the Founding Fathers protesting from beyond the grave. They have been doing it when George Bush, at a breakfast of religious leaders, scorched the Democrats for failing to mention God in their platform and declaimed that a President needs to believe in the Almighty. What about the constitutional ban on "religious test(s)" for public office? the Founding Fathers would want to know. What about Tom Jefferson's conviction that it is possible for a nonbeliever to be a moral person, "find (ing) incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise"? Even George Washington must shudder in his sleep to hear the constant emphasis on "Judeo- Christian values." It was he who wrote, "We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land ... every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart." George Bush should know better than to encourage the theocratic ambitions of the Christian right. The "wall of separation" the Founding Fathers built between church and state is one of the best defenses freedom has ever had. Or have we already forgotten why the Founding Fathers put it up? They had seen enough religious intolerance in the colonies: Quaker women were burned at the stake in Puritan Massachusetts; Virginians could be jailed for denying the Bible's authority. No wonder John Adams once described the Judeo-Christian tradition as "the most bloody religion that ever existed," and that the Founding Fathers took such pains to keep the hand that holds the musket separate from the one that carries the cross. There was another reason for the separation of church and state, which no amount of pious ranting can expunge: not all the Founding Fathers believed in the same God, or in any God at all. Jefferson was a renowned doubter, urging his nephew to "question with boldness even the existence of a God." John Adams was at least a skeptic, as were of course the revolutionary firebrands Tom Paine and Ethan Allen. Naturally, they designed a republic in which they themselves would have a place. Yet another reason argues for the separation of church and state. If the Founding Fathers had one overarching aim, it was to limit the power not of the churches but of the state. They were deeply concerned, as Adams wrote, that "government shall be considered as having in it nothing more mysterious or divine than other arts or sciences.' Surely the Republicans, committed as they are to "limited government," ought to honor the secular spirit that has limited our government from the moment of its birth.

单选题Aristotle believed that the heavens were perfect. If they ever were, they are no longer. The skies above Earth are now littered with the debris of dead satellites, bits of old rockets and the odd tools dropped by a spacewalking astronaut. Such is the extent of the detritus that the first accidental collision between two satellites has already taken place. It happened in February 2009, when a defunct Russian Cosmos smashed into a functioning American Iridium, destroying both and creating even more space junk. To stop this sort of thing happening again, Vaios Lappas of the University of Surrey, in England, has designed a system that will remove satellites from orbit at the end of their useful lives—and as a bonus will scour part of the sky clean as it does so. Dr. Lappas's satellite-removal system employs a solar sail. As light from the sun hits the sail, it imparts a minuscule but continuous acceleration. When a satellite is first launched, the sail is angled in a way that causes this acceleration to keep the satellite in orbit. (Orbits gradually decay as a result of collisions with the small number of air molecules found even at altitudes normally classified as "outer space". ) Solar sails have yet to be used widely to propel spacecraft in this way—several earlier versions came unstuck when the sails failed to unfurl properly—but doing so is not a novel idea in principle. The novelty Dr. Lappas envisages is to change the angle of the sail when the satellite has become defunct. Instead of keeping the derelict craft in orbit, it will, over the course of a couple of years, drag it into the atmosphere and thus to a fiery end. Not only that, but the sail will also act like a handkerchief, mopping up microscopic orbital detritus such as flecks of paint from previous launches: A fleck of paint may not sound dangerous, but if travelling at 27,000kph (17,0OOmph), as it would be in orbit, it could easily penetrate an astronaut's spacesuit. A prototype of Dr. Lappas's design, called CubeSail, will be launched late next year. It weighs just 3kg (71b) and, when folded up, measures 30cm (12 inches) by 10cm by 10cm. Once unfurled, however, the sail will have an area of 25 square metres. If this prototype, which is paid for by EADS, a European aerospace company, proves successful, solar sails might be added to many future satellites. That would enable them to be removed rapidly from orbit when they became useless and would restore to the skies some measure of Aristotelian perfection.

单选题The writer holds the opinion that fantasies ______.

单选题What does the word "they" (Para. 4) refer to?

单选题It is found that insulin

单选题Why does the author mention "there is wide-spread uneasiness and confusion" (Line 4, Par

单选题At this point, most of us generally have a clue about the basics of staying in good health--eat well, exercise, don't drink too much and don't smoke. And plenty of research has been dedicated to exploring how failing on any of those fronts, or even more than one at a time, can be detrimental to overall health. Yet, for many people, those bad habits have a way of accumulating. And, according to a new study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, their cumulative impact can be pretty grim. In an analysis of nearly 5,000 adults tracked for two decades, researchers found that stacking up these four bad habits can work together to prematurely age you by as much as 12 years. Looked at independently, the risky behaviors included smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, little consumption of fruit and vegetables and regular drinking--an average of three drinks per day for men, or two for women. When compared to people who had the most healthy habits--those who never smoked, exercised at least two hours per week, ate plenty of fruits and vegetables and didn't drink at all, or drank more moderately, those with all four bad habits had an increased risk of death equivalent to being 12 years older. In fact, the study authors say that compared with practicing none of these bad habits, the combined effect of all four behaviors tripled or even quadrupled the risk of death. As the Associated Press points out: Overall, 314 people studied had all four unhealthy behaviors. Among them, 91 died during the study, or 29 percent. A- mong the 387 healthiest people with none of the four habits, only 32 died, or about 8 percent. Of course, while these findings are stark, the notion that individual unhealthy behaviors can join forces to have a cumulatively negative impact is not new. Responding to the findings, Dr. Walter Willett, the chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, pointed out similar findings in the large scale Nurses' Health Study. Still, Willet said that the simple, common sense steps that people can take to improve their overall health bear repeating, and studies that hammer home these correlations are indeed worthwhile. Re- ferring to the new findings published this week, he wrote in an email to TIME, the "conclusions are profoundly important and worth replicating: healthy lifestyle practices that are modest and simple--specifically, not smoking, getting regular physical activity, eating a good diet and avoiding excessive alcohol consumption--can profoundly affect our chances of living to an old age./

单选题In order to "change lives for the better" and reduce "dependency", George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced the "upfront work search" scheme. Only if the jobless arrive at the job centre with a CV, register for online job search, and start looking for work will they be eligible for benefit—and then they should report weekly rather than fortnightly. What could be more reasonable? More apparent reasonableness followed. There will now be a seven-day wait for the jobseeker"s allowance. "Those first few days should be spent looking for work, not looking to sign on ," he claimed. "We"re doing these things because we know they help people stay off benefits and help those on benefits get into work faster" Help? Really? On first hearing, this was the socially concerned chancellor, trying to change lives for the better, complete with "reforms" to an obviously indulgent system that demands too little effort from the newly unemployed to find work, and subsidises laziness. What motivated him, we were to understand, was his zeal for "fundamental fairness"—protecting the taxpayer, controlling spending and ensuring that only the most deserving claimants received their benefits. Losing a job is hurting: you don"t skip down to the job centre with a song in your heart, delighted at the prospect of doubling your income from the generous state. It is financially terrifying, psychologically embarrassing and you know that support is minimal and extraordinarily hard to get. You are now not wanted; you are now excluded from the work environment that offers purpose and structure in your life. Worse, the crucial income to feed yourself and your family and pay the bills has disappeared. Ask anyone newly unemployed what they want and the answer is always: a job. But in Osborne land, your first instinct is to fall into dependency—permanent dependency if you can get it—supported by a state only too ready to indulge your falsehood. It is as though 20 years of ever-tougher reforms of the job search and benefit administration system never happened. The principle of British welfare is no longer that you can insure yourself against the risk of unemployment and receive unconditional payments if the disaster happens. Even the very phrase "job seeker"s allowance" is about redefining the unemployed as a "jobseeker" who had no fundamental right to a benefit he or she has earned through making national insurance contributions. Instead, the claimant receives a time-limited "allowance," conditional on actively seeking a job; no entitlement and no insurance, at ￡71.70 a week, one of the least generous in the EU.

单选题Mr Phillips' thought is made unconvincing by

单选题Last week, Utah federal Judge Paul G. Cassell handed a 22-year sentence to a man who beat an elderly woman to death with a log. A few hours later, Judge Cassell sentenced a 25-year-old first-time drug offender to 55 years. If you think Judge Cassell liked sentencing a small-change drug dealer to more time than a violent killer, guess again. The judge had no choice. Federal law demanded the sentence, despite Judge Cassell's pointed questioning if there was a "rational basis" for sentencing Weldon H. Angelos, the father of two young children, to more time than he could sentence a hijacker, murder or rapist. Blame federal mandatory minimum sentencing rules. A jury found Angelos guilty on three separate charges of possessing a firearm while he sold a half-pound of marijuana for ＄ 350. The first charge of possessing a gun during a drug transaction brought a five-year sentence--the second two charges brought 25 years each. That adds up to 55 years, so even if Angelos were found guilty of selling ＄1,050 of drugs, Judge Cassell had to follow the rules and sentence him to 55 years on the gun charges. (The judge did use a recent federal ruling in reducing the sentence for the drug-selling crimes to one day. ) Judge Cassell was right to impose the draconian sentence. If he ignored federal law, he would place himself above it. Instead, Judge Cassell sentenced Angelus as the law directed, even as he righteously hectored Congress to rewrite federal drug laws so first-time offenders don't serve more time than dangerous career criminals. The judge also urged Angelus' attorney, Jerome H. Mooney, to appeal the sentence and, if appeals fail, seek a presidential commutation. While civil-rights advocates across America protested the sentence, the Utah US Attorney's office defended the system. To prosecutors, Angelus is no Buy Scout. Officials found some 26 empty duffel hags with marijuana residue. Local feds believed Angelus was a big drug dealer, Assistant US Attorney Robert Lund told me, and associated with a violent street gang. Let me say this: Angelus never was a good poster boy for the movement to humanize draconian federal drug laws. Angelus turned down a plea-bargain sentence of 16 years. He is considered a first-time offender only because a juvenile gun conviction was expunged from his record. And even if Angelos didn't wave his gun in people's faces, he nonetheless brought a gun with him during the transactions. But Angelos has become a national cause celebre because of Judge Cassell. There are more egregious examples of first-time offenders sentenced to decades for petty dealing, but they didn't come before a judge vocally opposed to the heavy handed nature of federal drug sentencing. That said, it simply doesn't make sense that federal sentences often are tougher on small-time drug offenders than on violent criminals. But it happens all the time.

单选题Wherever people have been, they have left waste behind, which can cause all sorts of problems. Waste often stinks, attracts vermin and creates eyesores. More seriously, it can release harmful chemicals into the soil and water when dumped, or into the air when burned. And then there are some really nasty forms of industrial waste, such as spent nuclear fuel, for which no universally accepted disposal methods have thus far been developed. Yet many also see waste as an opportunity. Getting rid of it all has become a huge global business. Rich countries spend some $120 billion a year disposing of their municipal waste alone and another $150 billion on industrial waste. The amount of waste that countries produce tends to grow in tandem with their economies, and especially with the rate of urbanization. So waste firms see a rich future in places such as China, India and Brazil, which at present spend only about $ 5 billion a year collecting and treating their municipal waste. Waste also presents an opportunity in a grander sense: as a potential resource. Much of it is already burned to generate energy. Clever new technologies to turn it into fertiliser or chemicals or fuel are being developed all the time. Visionaries see a world without waste, with rubbish being routinely recycled. Until last summer such views were spreading quickly. But since then plummeting prices for virgin paper, plastic and fuels, and hence also for the waste that substitutes for them, have put an end to such visions. Many of the recycling firms that had argued rubbish was on the way out now say that unless they are given financial help, they themselves will disappear. Subsidies are a bad idea. Governments have a role to play in the business of waste management, but it is a regulatory and supervisory one. They should oblige people who create waste to clean up after themselves and ideally ensure that the price of any product reflects the cost of disposing of it safely. That would help to signal which items are hardest to get rid of, giving consumers an incentive to buy goods that create less waste in the first place. That may sound simple enough, but governments seldom get the roles right. In poorer countries they often have no rules at all, or if they have them they fail to enforce them. In rich countries they are often inconsistent: too strict about some sorts of waste and worryingly lax about others. They are also prone to imposing arbitrary targets and taxes. California, for example, wants to recycle all its trash not because it necessarily makes environmental or economic sense but because the goal of "zero waste" sounds politically attractive.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} When Dr. John W.Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California and a leading nuclear critic, speaks of "ecocide" in his adversary view of nuclear technology, he means the following: A large nuclear plant like that in Kalkar, the Netherlands, would produce about 200 pounds of plutonium each year. One pound, released into the atmosphere, could cause 9 billion cases of lung cancer. This waste product must be stored for 500,000 years before it is of no further danger to man. In the anticipated reactor economy, it is estimated that there will be 10,000 tons of this material in Western Europe, of which one table-spoonful of plutonium-239 represents the official maximum permissible body burden for 200,000 people. Rather than being biodegradable, plutonium destroys biological properties. In 1972 the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration ruled that the asbestos level in the work place should be lowered to 2 fibers per cubic centimeter of air, but the effective date of the ruling has been delayed until now. The International Federation of Chemical and General Workers' Unions report that the 2-fiber standard was based primarily on one study of 290 men at a British asbestos factory. But when the workers at the British factory had been reexamined by another physician, 40--70 percent had X-ray evidence of lung abnormalities. According to present medical information at the factory in question, out of a total of 29 deaths thus far, seven were caused by lung cancer. An average European or American worker comes into contact with six million fibers a day. "We are now, in fact, finding cancer deaths within the family of the asbestos worker," states Dr. Irving Selikoff, of the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. It is now also clear that vinyl chloride, a gas from which the most widely used plastics are made, causes a fatal cancer of the blood-vessel cells of the liver. However, the history of the research on vinyl chloride is, in some ways, more disturbing than the "Watergate cover-up." "There has been evidence of potentially serious disease among polyvinyl chloride workers for 25 years that has been incompletely appreciated and inadequately approached by medical scientists and by regulatory authorities," summed up Dr. Selikoff in the New Scientist. At least 17 workers have been killed by vinyl chloride because research over the past 25 years was not followed up. And for over 10 years, workers have been exposed to concentrations of vinyl chloride 10 times the "safe limit" imposed by Dow Chemical Company. (422 words){{B}}Notes:{{/B}} plutonium 钚。asbestos 石棉。polyvinyl chloride 聚氯乙烯。

单选题The author of this passage is mainly concerned with______.